Thursday, August 06, 2009

seattle, the place to be

Seattle earns top marks. Truly the place to be.

Smarter Cities Rankings

to the big fellow in the locker room

1. There is no reason to glare at other people who happen to glance over when they first notice you in the room. It's a natural human reaction (the looking, not the glaring).

2. I understand that your locker was right in front of my shower stall, but please, cover yourself. Instead of spending a minute meticulously laying out your towel on the floor (to keep your feet clean? where were you standing while laying out the towel?) maybe you could use it to cover yourself. And no, I'm not sure the profile view is better or worse than the full frontal.

3. I'm not sure why you needed to stand there naked for an additional minute. I'm even less sure of why you needed to turn directly towards me for that additional minute. I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

itunes is brilliantly shitty

I made my attempt to update my iPhone's firmware to 3.0.1 today. Still in progress several hours later because iTunes is ridiculously idiotic.

Fail #0:
Apple finally patches a known security hole because the people who made them aware of it months ago are about to tell the world about the SMS exploit at a conference. This motivates me to try to update the firmware.

Fail #1:
iTunes failed to install the new firmware. Bricked several times with error #14. I've been that error before trying to install a firmware and the previous time I got around it by updating to iTunes 8.2.1.

Fail #2:
Still fails to install the new firmware. Thankfully, I have the old 3.0 firmware laying around and I'm able to restore to that. After that restore it has the firmware and functions, I try and restore my backup.

Fail #3:
The restore of the backup aborts. iTunes claims that the iPhone disconnected (of course it wasn't). At this point, none of my apps have been restored and the thing looks jacked up (the Google Talk logo is just a blank square). At least my contacts and bookmarks are all there.

Fail #4:
Upon reconnecting the iPhone, iTunes immediately backs up my iPhone, replacing the good backup with a bad backup.

Fail #5:
I sign up for a trial of mobileMe, thinking it would be a sure easy way to back up my contacts and bookmarks. It backs up my contacts. When asking it to backup my bookmarks, it tells me I can only sync bookmarks if I delete all of them. What's the point of that?

Fail #5:
iTunes refuses to recognize the iPhone at all. A reboot is required.

Fail #6:
Even after putting the phone into DFU mode (don't ask), it still won't take the new firmware. Fantastic.

Fail #7:
iTunes now refuses to install the 3.0 firmware. Seems like I'll brick my phone doing a minor update while I never bricked my phones while jailbreaking. Brilliant.

Fail #8:
After three tries (and two different new error codes), 3.0 installs. Great! Then in my endless optimism, I try to install 3.0.1 again. Fail.

to be continued...

Monday, August 03, 2009

wtf, iphone